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A Good Business Database helps a company organize, stock, contact and provide information about customers and additional leads. It is very important to a company’s growth since it gives access to their sales and marketing personnel to concentrate on specific targeted audiences and covert the database leads into potential sales. By having a good business database, the company can analyze existing client demographics and provide feedback on how to optimize their products and services.

Good databases give bountiful benefits that enable the sharing of information. All data is stored in a location and everyone has admission to the most updated information offered. The company’s sales staff will be equipped with tools they need to attend to their customers.

Having a database makes it very simple for a company to gather, store and analyze client information. Contact information is used to alert customers about product updates, promotions and discounts through fax or via e-mail. Marketing experts would also be able to track leads and use it to plan ahead than their competitors so that they can have an assurance that they have fully reached their target market

Average call handling time (AHT) measures Contact Centre efficiency. A lengthy conversation can be unnecessary – e.g.: The lonely lady that will talk about her ailments, she continues to describe her neighbors kids or her daily routines.

If the average calls handling time is too short, it may affect quality of service.

It is important to get the balance right.

Over the next few weeks ask your agents to analyze themselves. “Self reviews” have benefits. Ask; “Was the average call handling time right for the call?” Always remember to give positive feedback back to the agent/s.

13 top tips for reducing your call handling time:

Gather all information at the beginning of the call – The more information you get the better. Receiving random filtered information is not productive.

Get the basics and retain control – Similar to the above however try to maintain a call flow structure. This assists you in navigating the system ahead of time. Stay focused, listen, relay information back, clarify and resolve the query. If you need to refer the call to a more skilled officer it’s okay to put the customer on hold; just

People can make the mistake of thinking that etiquette is something people only do face to face. Not so! Observing etiquette on the phone is very important, especially if you are trying to sell something to the person at the other end of the line. Here is how to ensure the person at the other end of the line doesn’t blow a whistle in your ear!

Ditch the script… make a plan using plain English instead

One mistake telephone sellers can make is to sound rehearsed over the phone. Nothing is more annoying to a listener than to detect that a script is being reeled off and this effect is magnified if the scripted speel in not in a language you speak fluently. The listener at the other end of a scripted sales call immediately feels like they are not important and, regardless of culture, this can send people reaching for their whistle to blow in your ear! If the person you are due to speak to doesn’t speak English well, use simple, unscripted language and avoid complex grammar in sentences.

In a world where we are all trying to get the attention of the customer through Direct Mail, Email Marketing, PPC, SEO, and Social Media it is apparent that one hugely important element in the marketing mix in converting prospects into customers is through Telemarketing.

Telemarketing is still seen as one of the most cost effective tools, identifying your ideal target customers, cleansing that data to ensure you get the right individual, marketing to that said individual and then following up with telemarketing is a sure key way to convert more prospects into customers and win new business.

If this type of marketing medium is carried out successfully you will be hugely surprised by the results you can achieve. Telesales or telemarketing works on percentages. So for every 100 telephone calls that a telemarketer makes on your behalf the response rate should be around 5-6% return rate if the telemarketer understands their objective, your company and the role they all have to play.

Just as winning new business is the lifeblood to the success of any business, taking care of your existing accounts should also be a

In our relentless quest to get a prospects’ attention we need to engage in strategies that achieve this but also not be an annoyance at the same time! As sales executives we know we’re always walking a fine line between the two when pushing messages out to our prospects. I’m a big believer in email as an alternative to cold calling because of a few reasons:

the email is delivered to your prospects’ inbox vs a cold call is screened by your prospects’ call-display unit

the email message remains in your prospects’ inbox until he or she has time to read it and respond (or delete it but if you follow what I’m going to outline here then you will minimize the chances of that happening!)

the email is MUCH more likely to be responded to than a voicemail

the email has a much larger chance of bypassing spam filters if it’s personalized.

If you have not had success with emailing your prospects in the past it could be for a number of reasons. The most likely reasons for emails being ignored or promptly deleted are:

It’s quite an awesome feat when you think about it. It requires a talented individual to be able to do that well. Here are 20 Tips to help you become a more effective tele-persuader:

1. Have a primary objective for every call. An objective that advances your selling cycle in some specific way. Ask yourself “What do I want them to DO as a result of this call?”

2. Prepare questions for your call using your call objective. Ask yourself, “How can I persuade them to take this action as a result of asking questions, as opposed to talking?” Remember, people believe more of their ideas than yours.

3. If you are dealing with a “gatekeeper,” treat the screener as you would the customer. This person determines whether or not you’ll even have a chance to speak with the buyer.

4. Have a reason for needing to speak with the decision maker, and be prepared to sell this to the screener. What they’re thinking about you: “Does this person have anything of interest or of value for the boss?”

How often do you get a voicemail that misses some critical information?

Voicemails are an effective tool if used correctly, but they can be frustrating if they are done badly.

In the last few days I have had several voicemails that have been difficult to understand, I listen to them a couple of times but if I don’t get the message by then I just ignore them! That defeats the purpose of the call and leaves me frustrated. Clearly just a little bit of attention by the caller would have made it a positive experience rather than a frustrating one. Speaking too fast, speaking too close to the microphone can create a lisp that makes it hard to hear and accents can be difficult to understand… I had them all this week!

Here are a few tips for leaving business voicemails:

1. Be prepared… if you are expecting to talk to someone, and are not prepared to leave a voicemail then hang up. You can call back when you have thought through your message.

When evaluating an outbound contact center solution, it’s important to understand the wide spectrum of offerings on the market. Some are merely automated phone dialers dressed up as a complete solution. Still others are call center products – they handle only voice calls – pretending to be multichannel contact center solutions capable of handling voice, e-mail, mobile, social media and other engagement channels. So it’s important to drill down past the labels and understand the solution’s capabilities, and whether or not it really meets your needs.

Beyond the technology, you need to also look at the vendor itself and ask whether or not it has the strategic partnerships to deliver non-core functionality, like workforce management, and the financial backing to sustain itself, even in hard business times.

A well-rounded evaluation of the product, technology and vendor background will help ensure you settle on the best outbound contact center solution for your needs. Here are some of the specifics to consider:

Product and Technology

1. Unified Customer Experience: Does the product provide a unified experience for the consumer? If you place an outbound call to a consumer, and they

Marketing is how you communicate with your prospective clients with the goal of selling your product or service to them. Selling the feature of your product or service is a key aspect of management. But closing a deal that leads to a sale is definitely the best part of marketing.

Being able to work in a call center, allow me to share with you my experience in telemarketing. But first let me give you the definition of what telemarketing is.

TELEMARKETING is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or Web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. The person responsible for selling the product or service over the phone is called a TELEMARKETER in which they do not meet the customers personally.

In telemarketing, we only make transactions over the phone. So, good telemarketers need to be well-oriented with the product/service being sold aside from knowing the company. We need to tell our potential clients the edge of our product over our competitors by studying the

When you hear or read the word “telemarketing”, the last thing that you will do is to associate this with a charitable endeavor or project. However, since many charitable and non-profit organizations are having a hard time raising funds for their worthwhile projects intended to help the poor or needy, these groups have also chosen to get help with getting the money they need by working with telemarketers.

Telemarketing though still has a bad reputation today and as such, although it will be used for a totally meaningful purpose, such as raising funds for a charitable institution, this option or strategy might not help you reach your goals. The main reasons behind this is because there are potential donors who feel that telemarketing goals are disturbing and are put off by these immediately. Another reason is even if the person pledges to contribute a certain amount during the call, he or she may still not deliver. Studies show that about 20% of people making pledges via a phone call will not pay them.

There are ways for you to ensure the success of a non-profit telemarketing

Many new final expense agents will ask, “Can I sell final expense by phone?”

The goal of this article is to answer the question about selling final expense by phone, and provide some details as to why it’s a disadvantage for most new agents to do versus working face-to-face.

As time goes on, more final expense carriers are simplifying the process of taking applications entirely over the phone; the carriers will do an electronic application or voice-signature application that does not require any sort of ink or face-to-face interaction with the prospect.

Seniors in many cases are very wary about giving their personal information over the phone to a stranger. Closing rates when agents sell by phone tend to be lower, while business tends to not last as long on the books compared to face-to-face sales.

Call Centers

There are few independent agents that successfully sell final expense over the phone. The call center environment does a better job on average selling over the phone. Call centers are more of a boiler room type of operation. You really don’t see a lot of independent agents in this business succeed

Have you taken the time to think about your telephone presentations lately?

Year by year, as people continue to communicate by text on the smartphones, it becomes more challenging to communicate by phone. Challenging but not impossible. Taking the time to tweak our presentations keeps us on our toes and continually helps us to become more successful selling on the phone.

Possibly the hardest thing to do these days is reach a decision maker by phone. People don’t listen to voice mails, don’t pick up if they don’t know your numbers and generally make a snap decision whether they want to speak with you.

What happens when you do reach them, though? Are you making the most of your opportunity? Have you created an opening that makes people want to listen to you and become active participants in the conversation? All too often when I look at prepared scripts, I notice sentences that might look well in a direct mail piece but will either get you shot down quickly or simply won’t engage your prospective customer.

Here’s two clichéd examples: openings that tout money savings or a saving

Training up your low performing agents with those that are performing the best is a great tactic to boost their morale and motivate them. Listening to the sales pitch of these agents and the methods they use to convert a lead into sales helps them change their calling approach. They absorb things that are working and then use them in their own calls.

Provide Short Breaks

Telemarketing requires your agents to be energetic and enthusiastic on every call. The smile and confidence they show over the phone reflects on the other side of the line. Regular short breaks helps them break their monotony and allows them to regain their energy and remain active throughout the day.

Regular, but Short Briefings

It is great to start your day with a briefing session that is mainly targeted at increasing your agents enthuse levels and motivates them towards a cheerful start. This, however, should not be the only session in a day. To increase the performance of their agents, managers need to have short briefings, say 2 or 3 during the entire day. These meetings should be taken with a

Cold Calling is not as sexy as social selling, life cycle messaging, or content marketing. – And despite what any hipster ‘client success advocate’ tells you…

Cold Calling is NOT dead.

Before I disrupt the force and anger every mobile marketing Jedi in the galaxy… I want to make it clear that this article is more about the prospecting discipline of cold calling than it is about how to build a brand or where your leads come from. I am also not saying that social selling, drip campaigns, referral prospecting, and SMS marketing are an urban bohemian flavor of the month. These are very necessary and effective selling tools that have a definite place in customer engagement and prospect solicitation.

What I am sayingis that while there are several valuable ways to acquire new customers, I ardently believe that cold calling should be the centerpiece of new business development.

If you call a lead that it is not referred to you and you have never spoken with them before, it is a cold call. Maybe I

Now your sales representatives begin cold calling that list. Cold calling can be very effective, but all too often, the sale is hindered by poor cold calling etiquette. As a result, prospects are turned off by the sales call, instead of being interested in your product.

If you want your telemarketing list to live up to its full potential, try to educate your sales representatives and make sure they don’t commit any of these cold calling mistakes

Don’t Center the Conversation on You

Don’t begin the conversation by telling them what you do and what you can offer; this tactic usually results in the prospect shutting down the conversation before they have even participated in it.

Do Focus on Your Prospect.

What is important to them? What problems or issues would they like to solve? Let them guide the conversation. People aren’t really interested in hearing about the lives of perfect strangers, particularly when this comes in the form of a cold call. Use the cold call as a way to learn more about your prospect rather than pushing your product.

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. I prefer automated intelligence. It’s already with us in many forms. Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software.

Algorithms helping Google to be the smartest search engine in the galaxy.

Stock markets around the world use Algos, as they call them, allowing high frequency trading using algorithms. It’s estimated that as of 2009, high frequency trading accounted for 60-73% of all US equity trading volume. So Artificial Intelligence or AI has done away with human traders.

Robots, at such a low price, that you can afford one to cut your grass or vacuum your carpets.

Cars that drive without humans. Scary.

Amazon’s algorithms that suggest what you should buy next, the most successful cross-selling engine on the planet.

AI is already with us and is about to go through massive growth. Before I take a look at the predictions for us, let’s have a quick look at the economics of all of this, after all, it’s money that drives everything.

The Economic Influence

The fundamental aim of all advanced economies is to increase productivity. In other words to produce more goods and

Most organisations I work with have some form of customer database or CRM – customer relationship management – system in place. If you do, then you should learn every aspect of it and use it to run your working life. Simple.

A good CRM will allow you to track every contact with a customer, what you said, what they said and the progress you made along your company’s sales process. CRMs can be useful in curating data such as key performance indicators – KPIs and many of them have calendars and email management built in.

If you don’t have a CRM system either buy one, lease one that’s in the cloud such as Salesforce or use the latest version of Microsoft Outlook with the CRM add-on. Better still, obtain Office 365 for yourself and your team, add the CRM bolt on and you’re cooking on gas. If you’re familiar with Outlook and the Office suite of products then your learning curve for Office 365 will be negligible. I’m going to show you how you can do this

I always chuckle to myself when I read or hear someone proclaim “the cold call is dead”.

I can assure you that, to those who do proclaim such doom and gloom, the cold call was never alive! Cold calling has nothing to do with “cold”, and those who have built and continue everyday to build their businesses, utilizing this fundamental skill, are in an elite club. It’s a club that lives by the motto: “I believe I have something that people want and need, and I am excited to speak to them about it”. These club members wake up everyday embracing the words “believe” and “excited”, they never waver, and in doing so enjoy initial and long-term success in opening new accounts and forming new business relationships.

That kind of success doesn’t come from a place that’s “cold”, but one that’s warm and inviting. It doesn’t matter whether your job is selling insurance, stocks & bonds, cars, clothing, memberships or patio furniture; if you believe and are excited about your product or service, your enthusiasm and desire to talk to as many people as possible will

The first rule of marketing: do not ever mislead or falsify information; rather focus on the quality and brand name of product while marketing. It has been observed that companies which deliver Telemarketing Services; many of them mislead the consumers with incorrect information. Always keep it in mind during Outbound Telemarketing that consumers are no fools; rather they are more intelligent and smarter than the telemarketers. Genuine marketing personnel would always try to convince a consumer on the grounds of the quality and brand name. There’s a famous quote, “You can fool me only once”. The point is that, if marketing people fool the clients; they may succeed only once, with a failure for all remaining times. The next time, any consumer is not going to trust them.

There are several advantages and benefits of outsourcing Telemarketing Services. However, the five most important advantages of outsourcing Outbound Telemarketing are as follows:

1. Cost Factor: Some people feel that outsourcing telemarketing is costlier compared to having their own employees who in turn would do that job. That’s a misconception, and it’s very essential for the growth of

Training up your low performing agents with those that are performing the best is a great tactic to boost their morale and motivate them. Listening to the sales pitch of these agents and the methods they use to convert a lead into sales helps them change their calling approach. They absorb things that are working and then use them in their own calls.

Provide Short Breaks

Telemarketing requires your agents to be energetic and enthusiastic on every call. The smile and confidence they show over the phone reflects on the other side of the line. Regular short breaks helps them break their monotony and allows them to regain their energy and remain active throughout the day.

Regular, but Short Briefings

It is great to start your day with a briefing session that is mainly targeted at increasing your agents enthuse levels and motivates them towards a cheerful start. This, however, should not be the only session in a day. To increase the performance of their agents, managers need to have short briefings, say 2 or 3 during the entire day. These meetings should be taken with a